Notkin's party; Joelle's overdose — "This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor’s been going…"

The Entertainment surfaces first as party gossip — the lethal object rumored, mechanism-guessed, and already killing off-page. The film-theory crowd at Notkin's bats the "cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor" around as an old chestnut, then Comstock sketches how such a thing might work: not a story but "a beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector," an "optical dopamine-cue," "a recorded delusion" — the audience-side analogue of the p-terminal current (096) and the holographic-density theory (098), the lethality located in the act of looking itself. And buried in the chatter is the novel's earliest casualty sighting: "a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone" — the same Berkeley address the Entertainment surfaces at in the institutional ledger (107), heard here a hundred pages earlier as academic small-talk. The weapon is real and working before the book has confirmed it exists, and the people closest to its maker are discussing it as a scopophilic mechanism over drinks.